I use Suckless terminal myself, but if I'm not mistaken it's actually not the fastest terminal out there, despite its simplicity[^1]. My understanding is that many LOCs and complex logic routines are dedicated to hardware/platform-specific optimizations and compatibility, but admittedly this type of engineering is well beyond my familiarity.
Also, OpenBSD's philosophy is very similar to Suckless. One of the more notable projects that come to mind is the `doas` replacement for `sudo`.
[^1]: This is based on Dan Luu's testing (https://danluu.com/term-latency/). I don't know when this testing was done but I assume a few years ago because I remember finding it before.
I'm somewhat offended on behalf of OpenBSD! doas is a good program written for good reasons (cf. https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas). Suckless sudo would ensure it was as painful as possible to use, so suckless fans feel like cool sysadmin hackers setting it up. (Just compile in the permitted uids lol!)
I totally agree with doas being a good program with really good rationale. I also get that suckless does have a bit of a reputation that isnt for everyone (I've heard that it's basically impossible to make a PR to any of their projects). Theyre obviously not philosophically aligned, that was terrible wording, but I mentioned OpenBSD because its an excellent project that deserves more mention and a lot of the criticisms for modern software design in this post and thread are addressed by their design philosophy. That said, the compiling issue aside I think the overall embrace of simple, self-contained, C code is where you could compare the two.
Also, OpenBSD's philosophy is very similar to Suckless. One of the more notable projects that come to mind is the `doas` replacement for `sudo`.
[^1]: This is based on Dan Luu's testing (https://danluu.com/term-latency/). I don't know when this testing was done but I assume a few years ago because I remember finding it before.